Coming into the End Zone (12 page)

A letter in the mail this morning from Jay Booth, a student friend in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She says she has embarked on a new three-hour exercise program on the boardwalk in Dunes Park, a wonderful place that offers fine views of the sea. ‘However,' she says, ‘When I sit down to write, I fall asleep.'

This result of physical activity does not discourage her, she says. Because ‘this year my literary prize blossomed. Two years ago I was awarded a dogwood tree for the first chapter of my novel,
One Fine Day
. As dogwoods do not flourish or even survive here, I thought the whole business ominous, also comical. Well, the tree flourishes. The book, on the other hand, is out to publishers. I have two rejections so far.'

Correspondence has begun to arrive from the American Ballet Theatre about a projected two weeks in Paris, to live the high life, visit places not usually open to the ordinary traveler, and see a lot of ballet and opera. Jane Emerson, my daughter, is one of the organizers; I feel a certain maternal obligation to subscribe to the trip, but also some natural eagerness to see Paris again.

This evening I call to tell Jane I would like to go with her and her husband. Bob answers the phone. Jane is still at work at ABT, making arrangements. I ask him if he would find it onerous to be accompanied by an aging mother-in-law. He says, politely, not at all, he has a number of eccentric relatives. He once told me about his Uncle Seth, a man of absolute fidelity. After his first wife died, very young, he remained a good and faithful friend to her sisters and their many children. Late in life he remarried, having finally overcome his fidelity to his wife's memory. The new wife turned out to be psychotic; she was, apparently, treated by lobotomy. The son born to them was severely retarded. Now in his eighties, Uncle Seth concerns himself solely with the constant, loyal care of his wife and son.

I tell Bob to inform Jane I intend to accompany them to Paris.

A letter from Ted and Robert, Washingtonians transplanted to central Maine, friends we made through the bookstore; they were among our early customers. They invite us to spend Christmas with them in Blue Hill while, they hope, we will look for a house to buy near there. Their friend Bill Petry, a real estate agent, knows of some places we might like to inspect.

Maine?
Maine?
Well, yes. Sybil and I have often thought about moving there, debating our separate and often contrary needs. I want to leave this dangerous, badly run, threatening, crack-and-crime-filled city. She loves the variety and excitement of Seventh Street, and the people who come in to Wayward Books to chat with and buy from her. Break-ins and violence happen everywhere, she says, citing the thug who broke into Ted's car when it was left overnight in a motel parking lot in Portland, Maine. In
Maine?
she wonders.

‘Omaha, Nebraska, I have read,' she says, ‘is a major terminus for the drug trade.' She reminds me that two years ago an anonymous caller had threatened, by telephone, to come and rape me in Iowa City, and that my rented house in that city was broken into through a side door on Halloween. But I continue to remember my trashed car, and the sight of the floor of the bookstore strewn with books and papers after someone had ransacked it looking for the cash box.

I hate the sense of vulnerability I have on Capitol Hill, the feeling that my grey head and unsteady gait make me a natural prey of young marauders during the day, and especially at night, when I have to park the car some distance from our front door and make my hesitant, wary way across the dark street and through the even darker path to the door.

Maine seems to me to be healthier, safer, cleaner, freer from drugs, guns, muggers, gangs. This morning the
Post
reported an eleven-year-old boy in Washington had killed his father, shot off the top of his head with the father's handgun. The
Post
called this an ‘incident.' I am always shocked by the implication of insignificance of that word. For some reason, the third and fifth dictionary definitions are what I always think of: ‘3) something that occurs casually in connection with something else,' and ‘5) an occurrence of seemingly minor importance.' The ‘occurrence' reported by the
Post
is more than an incident.

This morning I sent my yearly contribution to the
Catholic Worker, a
publication I have read and subscribed to since the early thirties. My check has grown larger with time. I remember my first donation was one dollar when Dorothy Day asked for an emergency sum for the maintenance of the Catholic Worker House on Christie Street.

Since then, during the years of my acquaintance with Dorothy, and after her death, I have been one of those conscientious but characterless supporters who gives money but not themselves. Once, in the thirties, I worked in the soup kitchen at Christie Street, and later on the coffee-serving line for a longshoremen's strike. But those were youthful acts, ‘incidents' in a long, selfish life away from the slight service of my youth. Dorothy Day did it for me, offering her entire life for the poor, the homeless, the drunken and mad, the objectors to war, the victims of injustice.

My check, I remind myself, is not tax-exempt. I rummage in my files to find a copy of the issue of the
Worker
that contains the policy statement on this matter:

We have never sought tax-exempt status since we are convinced that justice and the works of mercy should be acts of conscience which come at a personal sacrifice, without governmental approval, regulation, or reward.… Also, since much of what we do might be considered ‘political,' in the sense that we strive to question, challenge, and confront our present society and many of its structures and values, some would deem us technically ineligible for tax-deductible, charitable status.

I admire this position. I have always cringed at the letters that arrive in December from charitable organizations urging me to contribute before the end of the year so I may take advantage of a tax deduction. The
Catholic Worker
's statement reminds me of how much must be spent, in time and resources, to obtain and maintain a tax-exempt status.

I went to Dorothy Day's funeral a few years ago. It was a wonderful reunion of friends and former workers as well as present inhabitants and workers at the houses on East First Street and Maryhouse. Mass was formal and old-fashioned, the kind Dorothy loved and hated to see reformed. How ironic, I remember thinking as I watched the Cardinal of New York kneeling before her plain pine box, that a women who spent her life fighting for social reform and against the retrogressive social failures of the Church would not countenance any changes in the liturgy. But at the last, the hierarchy of the diocese came in full red regalia to the scruffy Lower East Side church to pray with the people she had cared for and officialdom had often turned its back upon.

‘Works of mercy should be acts of conscience …' I seal the letter with my check and stamp it with a commemorative stamp that reads
LOVE
.

October 10. I put down this date, although my habit in journals is not to do so. If something is worth recording, I have always thought, it ought to be general enough to be free of dull, diurnal notation. But this day:

I take the very early Metroliner (six-fifty, an unusual hour for me to take a train) to New York for a meeting of the board of the National Book Critics Circle, a group I have belonged to for many years. A law has been passed which, I believe, makes this the last year of my term, so I am determined to attend every meeting, despite the cost of travel. We are reimbursed only for the two last meetings in the year if we do not serve an institution that pays our way. National Public Radio does not do this for me.

We talk about NBCC business and possible recommendations of books deserving of nomination for an award. It is always fun to meet with other critics and editors. We hole up on the third floor of the Algonquin Hotel, and argue, insult each other pleasantly by challenging the validity of views different from our own, eat a buffet lunch together as we work, and take notes on books of interest we have missed and ought now to read.

At four o'clock the meeting is over. I planned to meet my daughter Jane at the Public Library for a cocktail party a publisher is giving to celebrate the appearance of the first volume of T. S. Eliot's letters. I need coffee, as I always do between events. Caffeine acts as oil with which to shift gears, sustenance for my flagging spirits. Flagging: why is that adjective always used for spirits? The
Oxford English Dictionary
informs me that the usage is three hundred years old and first referred to falling down through feebleness. It then was used for the heart, then the circulation. Matthew Arnold was the first to speak of ‘a spiritual flagging.' I buy coffee in a plastic cup and carry it to the benches on Forty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue (now called, grandly, the Avenue of the Americas, but in my youth known simply by its common number).

While I drink I watch a street lady eating a hot dog on a roll. Behind her and across Sixth Avenue is the store from which her food must have come. There is a huge sign over the door which reads:
AMERICA'S
24
HOUR HOST
.
STEAK
'
N
'
EGGS
. She converses with herself between bites in a loud, harsh voice and shakes her head at what I assume are the answers she hears in the air.

Her hair is composed of switches pinned, it seems, to a wig base, and at the top there is a great heavy bun. Her eyebrows are crusted and red, the same flush that covers her light-brown skin and culminates in an angry red ball at the end of her nose. Her body is very thin under a coat composed, like her hair, of parts that are pinned together, but her thinness disappears at her neck, which is full of thick folds of skin, like the necklaces African women wear to elongate their necks for beauty.

She finishes her hot dog, rises slowly, and walks to the trash container near the door to the office building. She moves as if her steps were painful. Her face suggests misery and resentment, as though the weight of all the bunches of cloth tacked on to her were depressing her spirits. She returns to her bench. Her profile is Flemish: the long, thin nose, the chin that falls away, a large black mole on her cheek. She wipes her mouth and her nose on her fingers and then puts them in her mouth. I shudder.

I finish my coffee, stand up to walk to the trash container, and, inexplicably, fall on my face. There is pain in my right ankle that turned and caused me to fall, and greater pain in my left shoulder, so intense that I cannot get up. I lie there, seeing two sets of feet in well-shined shoes pass me by without breaking stride. I try to think of a strategy that will get me on my feet, but without the use of my left arm and hand nothing works.

Then I see a brown hand near my face and hear the street lady's rough voice say: ‘Here. Hold on here.'

I do as she says, doubling my arm against hers and gripping her loose flesh as she holds mine. She pulls hard, I hold tight, I am up, dizzy. She puts her arm around my shoulders and puts me down on the bench. She sits beside me.

The next hour I remember with disbelief. The street lady, Nancy, and I talked about her life while she inquired about my pain and dizziness and advised me about therapy. ‘Don't get up yet,' she said, ‘or you'll conk out.' I think about finding a telephone to tell my daughter, who might still be at work at the Ballet Society, to meet me here instead of in front of the library. Is there a telephone in this office building? I ask her. ‘Yes,' she says, ‘but whatever you do don't use it. The AT and T puts devils on the wires and they get into your ears.' I give up my idea of calling Jane for fear of offending Nancy.

She tells me that she has money to buy a winter coat but storekeepers won't let her try their coats on. Silently I determine to come back and find her, take her to a store for a coat, try it on, and then let her buy it. She tells me she went through high school, took an ‘industrial' course, got a good job, married, had a daughter who lives now in another part of the city. ‘She never comes by to see me. I don't know her address.'

In the same year she lost both her husband and her job ‘and never could get ahead again.' She shares a room in a welfare hotel on Forty-sixth Street with three other women; they sleep in one bed in shifts. In warm weather she prefers to bed down in the doorways of her street, where the mattress devils can't get at her. And the evil spirits in the pillows. ‘But I like to have an address. Welfare checks come to me there. So I have some little to get by on,' she tells me.

‘Winter is the worst,' she says. ‘Even now, in October, it's too cold.' Her parents came from Haiti, she says with some pride. Her mother told her she never was warm once she got here. ‘But she saw I went to high, and then she died from her lungs and I married a bum, a devil.'

Five-thirty. I get up with difficulty. ‘I'll walk with you,' she says, but I say no, I can make it now. I thank her and give her a hug and tell her I hope to get back to New York soon and then I will look her up at her hotel. She says, ‘Oh yeah. Watch out for that devil at the front door. She's into voodoo and hexing.' I say I will, and limp down Forty-second Street to find an Ace bandage for my swollen ankle.

My daughter takes me to her apartment and then, this morning, to the Ballet's orthopedic fellow. He says my shoulder is broken, gives me pills and a sling and a warning to do therapeutic exercises after a week or else suffer permanent stiffness. I resolve to do as he says. But already, in all the night's pain and the next day's scurry to be relieved by a doctor and medicine, the memory of Nancy seems less distinct. Will I look her up if I come to New York at the end of the month for the Ballet's trip to Paris? Probably not, knowing how such resolves usually end for me.

Despite the uselessness of my left arm, and the blue-black color of my shoulder, I decide I will go to Paris as planned. I suggest to Nora Kerr that I do a piece for the travel section of the
New York Times
to be called, tentatively, ‘Paris on Five Hundred Dollars a Day,' because the itinerary sent me by the American Ballet Theatre is full of luxurious events such as I have never experienced. The clothes I will need will cost a fortune, in my scale of things. I will need to retire my jeans and sneakers (women do not customarily wear pants in Paris, my daughter informs me) and acquire the proper clothing for the cocktail receptions at the U.S. Embassy, cocktails at Claude and Sidney Picasso's apartment, a cocktail reception at the Baron and Baroness Guy de Rothschild's, evenings at the Paris Opera, the ballet, the theater, and concerts, a trip to Épernay for lunch with the Count Ghislain de Vogue, and, for the Friends of the Ballet I will be traveling with I suspect, the highlight: attendance at
haute couture
openings of Christian Dior and Christian Lacroix. Showings! Galas! Late suppers with royalty! Why am I, scruffy Doris Grumbach, traveling in this fashion?